Top Trends in Blogging & Twitter via Mashable

This morning as I was catching up with some of the blog posts I missed yesterday, I stopped for a deeper look at the Mashable article on Five Top Trends from experts attending the recent BlogWorld Expo.

One of my intentions is to find at least one post a day to write a comment or two on — and this article had both “thoughtful” opinions from well-known “thought leaders” as well as some pretty good comments from the “peanut gallery.”

Big Bloggers Tweeting More, Blogging Less

. . . according to Chris Pirillo [whose YouTube video on blogging I showed to my PR students], Twitter allows people to say more “pithy” things with less time and energy . . . pithy, maybe, but “more valuable”? — I think not. Here was the comment made by Micheline and my response:

Very interesting piece. As someone who is thinking of setting up and starting a blog, I identify with Chris Pirillo ‘s [@chrispirillo] view that “more and more bloggers are tweeting instead of blogging…” The challenge of expressing thoughts, ideas and chit-chat in 140 characters is quite refreshing.

Micheline, as someone who has only been blogging about six months — and also a Twitter fan — I continue to see these social media platforms as two entirely different communication tools. The writer in me may “tease” and/or “direct” people with a TWEET [like an appetizer, I suspect] but the real meal is in the blog post. BTW, if you have not yet started your blog AND would like a tutorial, please check my blog post on HOW TO START YOUR OWN BLOG: http://tinyurl.com/yahjdxk

The Evolution of Twitter as a Platform

Guy Kawasaki, who moderated a panel I covered in a recent report on “Does PR Suck?’, suggested the future value of Twitter was mainly for Business by pointing to the Kobi BBQ success story.

The real value of Twitter trends lies in their predictive value – the extent to which they are reliable leading indicators of broader business or social trends. There is some surprising evidence to the contrary coming in – i.e. that Twitter is in fact a lagging indicator in many cases. You can find out more here: http://blog.vanno.com/

Nick, I like Twitter mainly for Search. For example, I have a running list of tweets on my Tweetdeck for “Twitter for business”; “Facebook for business”; “Future of Advertising” and various #hashtags.

Semantic Intelligence

Brian Solis — one of my “heroes” ever since he brought his PR 2.0 philosophy to my PR students last spring — has the statistics to prove that Twitter is driving towards more intelligent, filtered [and thus USEFUL ?] conversation:

Twitter Curation

Steve Rubel — who was on an HP panel discussing Social Media Roadmap this past summer — suggests that the New Media companies will be filtering and aggregating Tweets of Value and that editors will have a host of opportunities. [Call on me guys :-)]

User Generated Twitter Lists

Leo Laporte, whom I have not had the good fortune to meet yet, echoes the praise for Twitter Lists — new functionality for Twitter that allows people to generate lists for others to follow.

Join the conversation. It’s FUN and INSTRUCTIVE. Read up on these trends and others . . . and then put in your own TWO CENTS!

This was really interesting. There is always a talk about twitter and its use. As i have stated before on one of Shari’s posts, I was not a user of twitter. I actually thought it was highly useless and stupid. I didn’t understand it. All I saw were my friends saying what they were doing throughout the day.

For example, I’m watching the Laker game! I asked myself, isn’t that the same thing was a facebook status? That was until I took Shari’s public relations class this past summer. I learned a lot about twitter, and mainly that it wasn’t just a status update.

Twitter is a good search engine tool- especially with Tweetdeck and ather apps. I used it for a project we had in class, and it was actually very useful.

The argument over twitter is not its usefulness, but rather whether enough people know about all the aspects of twitter?

When I found out about twitter, all i saw was a status update. But after taking a class, I learned that it was so much more. So what I ask is, How do we teach people more about twitter? Maybe twitter should work on a campaign in teaching its functions and uses for its site, instead of just letting “friends tell friends” Just thought it was an interesting suggestion.